White House, State Dept Rocked by Intermittent D.C. Power Outages

Widespread, intermittent power outages struck Washington D.C. Tuesday afternoon, affecting several prominent federal buildings including the White House and the Capitol. Residents were alerted to a problem when the city’s speedy and reliable Metro escalators shuttered to a stop.

The State Department, which still had no power as of this writing, was forced to conclude its press briefing in the dark:

Per the Washington Post, the cause of the outage was believed to be an explosion at a Maryland power plant, though that is unconfirmed.

Smithsonian reported that its museums were evacuated following outages:

A major power outage in DC is affecting some of our museums. @NPG, @americanart @airandspace and @SmithsonianNMAI are now evacuated

— Smithsonian (@smithsonian) April 7, 2015

If/when power is restored, we will reopen the buildings. We do not know when that will be at this time

— Smithsonian (@smithsonian) April 7, 2015

If you have a joke to make about a possible connection between the outages and Rand Paul’s just concluded announcement speech about shutting down the Washington machine, click here.

Watch a report from CNN, which didn’t let a brief power outage at their studios stop them from speculating away:

[Image via Shutterstock]

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